The CIA Used To Hand Hamid Karzai Grocery Bags Of Cash

Afghan president Hamid Karzai has a sugar daddy, and its name is
the Central Intelligence Agency. Or at least it had a
sugar daddy.

For over ten years, American spies greased Karzai's palms about
once a month with suitcases, backpacks and even plastic grocery
bags full of cash.

And not those relatively worthless Afghanis either.
According to a New York Times investigation, the CIA
delivered tens of millions of dollars in cash right to Karzai's
office. "We called it 'ghost money,' " Khalil Roman, Karzai's
former chief of staff, told The Times. "It came in
secret, and it left in secret."

This is nuts. It's absolutely bonkers. This is the sort of thing
you'd expect to see in some Clive Owen movie about America's
distopic future when we're ruled by mobsters with eye patches or
something. Or at the very least, it's something that read about
happening in a corrupt Central African dictatorship. In fact, a
similar thing
happened just a few days ago in Uganda where the president
thought it would be a good idea to distribute a photo of him
handing a giant bag of cash to some voters to show how generous
he was. Bad idea, because handing out big bags of trash typically
a sign of rampant corruption. (Well behaved people just write
checks.)

Evidently, that's exactly what's happening in Afghanistan. "The
biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United
States," an America official said to The Times. To
give you a sense of the scale of corruption, the only other
country found to be delivering bags of cash to Karzai was none
other than Iran. And what do we get for all that bread? Officials
on both sides say that "the agency's main goal in providing the
cash has been to maintain access to Mr. Karzai and his inner
circle and to guarantee the agency's influence at the
presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in
Afghanistan's highly centralized government."

Can you believe that? We have to sneak tens of millions of
dollars into the palace just so we can talk to the president?
What the heck is the CIA thinking? And for that matter, what the
heck is Afghanistan thinking? It's not like we just stormed into
their country and started a war or anything. Oh
wait yes we did.